Having sneezed involuntarily, he added a spell of coughing for which there was no necessity.  “I guess I must be wrong,” he muttered thickly.

“What about, Ramsey?”

“About it bein’ a squirrel.”  With infinite timidity he turned his head and encountered a gaze so soft, so hallowed, that it disconcerted him, and he dropped a “drumstick” of fried chicken, well dotted with ants, from his plate.  Scarlet he picked it up, but did not eat it.  For the first time in his life he felt that eating fried chicken held in the fingers was not to be thought of.  He replaced the “drumstick” upon his plate and allowed it to remain there untouched, in spite of a great hunger for it.

Having looked down, he now found difficulty in looking up, but gazed steadily at his plate, and into this limited circle of vision came Milla’s delicate and rosy fingers, bearing a gift.  “There,” she said in a motherly little voice.  “It’s a tomato mayonnaise sandwich and I made it myself.  I want you to eat it, Ramsey.”

His own fingers approached tremulousness as he accepted the thick sandwich from her and conveyed it to his mouth.  A moment later his soul filled with horror, for a spurt of mayonnaise dressing had caused a catastrophe the scene of which occupied no inconsiderable area of his right cheek; which was the cheek toward Milla.  He groped wretchedly for his handkerchief but could not find it; he had lost it.  Sudden death would have been relief; he was sure that after such grotesquerie Milla could never bear to have anything more to do with him; he was ruined.

In his anguish he felt a paper napkin pressed gently into his hand; a soft voice said in his ear, “Wipe it off with this, Ramsey.  Nobody’s noticing.”

So this incredibly charitable creature was still able to be his friend, even after seeing him mayonnaised!  Humbly marvelling, he did as she told him, but avoided all further risks.  He ate nothing more.

He sighed his first sigh of inexpressibleness, had a chill or so along the spine, and at intervals his brow was bedewed.

Within his averted eyes there dwelt not the Milla Rust who sat beside him, but an iridescent, fragile creature who had become angelic.

He spent the rest of the day dawdling helplessly about her; wherever she went he was near, as near as possible, but of no deliberate volition of his own.  Something seemed to tie him to her, and Milla was nothing loth.  He seldom looked at her directly, or for longer than an instant, and more rarely still did he speak to her except as a reply.  What few remarks he ventured upon his own initiative nearly all concerned the landscape, which he commended repeatedly in a weak voice, as “kind of pretty,” though once he said he guessed there might be bugs in the bark of a log on which they sat; and he became so immoderately personal as to declare that if the bugs had to get on anybody he’d rather they got on him than on Milla.  She said that was “just perfectly lovely” of him, asked where he got his sweet nature, and in other ways encouraged him to continue the revelation, but Ramsey was unable to get forward with it, though he opened and closed his mouth a great many times in the effort to do so.